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Friday, 25 May 2012

The Dark Side... Savita Kalhan

Yes, I have one. I’m told that a lot. In a light-hearted question and answer session with a group of authors (The Edge) where the question was – Who is the most likely to have a body buried in the basement? – the majority vote was cast for, yes, you’ve guessed it. Me. I don’t happen to have a basement at home, and it’s probably just as well... But then I probably wouldn’t use my own basement should that kind of need arise...

I have written about the darker side of life even though my main audience are teenagers or young adults. I don’t spare them the dark themes, sensitive issues, or molly-coddle them in any way, but I do spare them any gratuitous gruesome details, extraneous graphic imagery, and from endings with no hope. The Long Weekend is pretty dark. All the teens and young adults who have read it have finished it with no problem, but the same isn’t true of some adults. A book reviewer very apologetically said she could not finish it – she was the mum of two kids.

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Hell Wood

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My current work in progress is, once again, very dark. When I finish it I’ll put it in a drawer for a few months and then reread it because only by taking that step away from it can I judge if it’s any good. I like to work with a title, but that title can change by the end of the first chapter. It started as ‘Fly Away’. Now it has become Hell Wood, which feels so right that I’m hoping it will be the final title. The name is real – I didn’t have to make it up as it exists in the area the book is set in, although I didn’t know that when I set about writing the story. The research came after the book was halfway through – it sometimes works that way.

Btw, the twisted tree was actually two trees entwined together, and it almost looked as though one of them had been struck by lightning. I'll have to go back with a tree person who has more knowledge of these things than me.